How can we stimulate the senses in our museum programmes? How can we use our sense of smell to engage visitors?
My guest today, Sofia Collette Ehrich is an art historian and curator of multisensory experiences. She was a key researcher on Odeuropa – a European funded Horizon 2020 project that advocated for smell as an important part of Europe’s cultural heritage.
We discuss when she first realised her passion for working with scents and how smell can make museum experiences more engaging.
We cover her creation of a scent-based tour for Museum Ulm in Germany and a ‘Scratch and Sniff’ self-guided tour for the Amsterdam Museum.
We also look at the Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit, ‘smell walks,’ and the idea of a ‘sniffer in residence.’ Sofia shares lots of practical tips for adding olfactory elements to your programmes.
If you want to infuse the sense of smell into your practice or incorporate more multisensory approaches into your programmes, you’ll learn a lot from this episode!
Listen or read the transcript below. All the links are at the end of the transcript.
Transcript
Art Engager 131
Claire Bown: Hello and welcome to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown. I’m here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience and bring art, objects and ideas to life. So let’s dive into this week’s show.
Hello and welcome back to The Art Engager podcast. I’m your host, Claire Bown of Thinking Museum and this is episode 131. Today I’m talking to Sofia Collette Ehrich about how to engage our sense of smell in the museum. Before our chat, don’t forget last week I was talking to Inquiry Champion and Advocate Trevor Mackenzie about the power of inquiry and questioning.
If you haven’t listened to it yet, head back and download episode 130. And don’t forget about the back catalogue. The Art Engager now has over 130 episodes to choose from, so you can take your pick from old episodes, brush up on your skills, be inspired and learn new techniques. And if you’d like to shape future episodes, get in touch.
Maybe you’ve got a question for the show, an idea for a theme. or you want to suggest a guest. I’m always happy to hear from you, especially if you’re an educator doing innovative work engaging with art objects and audiences in museums and heritage. And finally, if you’d like to support this podcast and help it thrive into the future, you can buy me a cup of tea on buymeacoffee.com/clairebown. All right, let’s get on with today’s episode. My guest today, Sofia Collette Ehrich is an art historian and curator of multi sensory experiences. She was a key researcher on Odeuropa, a European funded Horizon 2020 project that advocated for smell as an important part of Europe’s Cultural Heritage.
At Odeuropa, Sofia produced five olfactory events, as well as researched, documented, and outlined the best practices and challenges of using smell as a storytelling technique in museums. This research resulted in a resource, an open access resource called the Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit, essentially a how to guide for working with smells in museums and heritage.
Sofia currently lives in the Netherlands, like me, and speaks internationally about multi sensory curation in museums. So today we talk about the moment she realised that smell was for her. We talk about why it’s important for her and how we can use smell to slow down and fully engage with museum objects.
We talk about the Odeuropa project and how she designed an olfactory guided tour with Museum Ulm in Germany. We talk about how that worked and the specific scent they created for a portrait in their collection. I’ll include a link in the show notes. We discuss as well a self guided scratch and sniff tour through Amsterdam made for the Amsterdam Museum.
Also, we explore the Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit and we talk about smell walks and having a sniffer in residence. Sofia also includes lots of practical tips for incorporating more olfactory elements in your programmes and practice. So this is a fascinating lesson for anyone wanting to infuse the sense of smell into their own practice.
Maybe you want to build a strong olfactory narrative, or you want to incorporate more multi sensory approaches into your programmes. This conversation is for you. Enjoy. Hi Sofia, and welcome to The Art Engager Podcast.
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Hi, thank you for having me.
Claire Bown: So, could you tell our listeners who you are and what you do?
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Sure. So, my name is Sofia Collette Ehrich. I’m originally from Los Angeles, California. I’ve been living in the Netherlands for about five years now in The Hague. I have an academic background in art history from UCLA, and I also studied a bit of media.
I’ve always been a lover of museums and cultural heritage since I was, you know, When I was a young kid, my mom always brought me to museums, and I’ve also always been interested in learning from museums as well, and experiencing how they’re a very interdisciplinary place. So there’s often a lot of different types of people working and sharing knowledge with each other.
So, for the past three years, I’ve been working for a research project about smell called Odeuropa. And the reason why I gave this brief introduction about loving cultural heritage and museums is because you don’t just wake up one day and say, I’m going to be an olfactory researcher.
So I thought it’s interesting to tie the two together. So Odeuropa was a project that focused on on olfactory or on smell heritage and history. And so I worked on that project as the Olfactory Events Manager or the Specialist. Olfactory Storyteller, Smell Event Organizer, however you want to put it, where I basically used smell as a storytelling technique or as a way of telling stories about the past.
So that’s a little bit about me. And I think we’ll dig a little bit deeper into Odeuropa and into what Olfactory Events Manager means later in the podcast.
Claire Bown: Sure. Now I invited you onto this podcast. to talk about your work specifically with smell.
How did you get into this? niche area of work?
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Well, there aren’t many of us out there, right? So I fell into it one day, I would say. So I actually was studying at Vrije University in Amsterdam, doing my master’s in comparative arts and media studies. So this was a course that was very focused on media, but we also had courses about, for example, the overlappings of media and exhibition design.
So we also had some of this museum influence there, museum and art influence, and I had some extra time on my hands because I took a little bit of extra time to do my master’s and I took a course called Knowing by Sensing with a professor called Caro Verbeek. And she’s one of the pioneers of, I would say pioneers of this olfactory storytelling realm and using scent as a way to interpret museum collections.
So I took this course with her and I really loved the course when I entered the course. And took I sat down and listened to her for the first couple minutes. I thought this is where I’m supposed to be. And so the course was about multisensory really engaging with all of your senses in order to learn about the world, but also as an academic tool, right?
Because usually we’re learning things. through texts and images and reading and writing papers and instead we would learn in this course through our senses. So how history has been defined by smell, for example, or how our senses can tell us about Our health and well being so these kinds of topics and we would learn about them in a multi sensory way.
So, for example, the jelly bean test, I don’t know if you know this one, where you learn the difference between smell and taste by putting a jelly bean in your mouth. Chewing it with your nose closed and then letting go of your nose and you realize that’s the difference between smell and taste because all of a sudden the flavor comes through your olfaction, that’s through your mouth and not through your nose.
and at the end of the course we were able to do a mock sensory exhibition. for a fictitious museum, you could say. And so this was where I really found my passion for interpreting museum collections through the senses in general, not just smell. And so from here is where I I ended up on the Odeuropa project organizing these olfactory events.
Claire Bown: And what is it in particular about smell that fascinates you? So Yeah, we can talk about the visual in museums all day long. the visual is dominant when we go into a museum. in our work, but what is it about smell that drew you in?
Sofia Collette Ehrich: So, one of the cliches that we say in this field is, did you know that smell is connected to emotion and memory?
We say it’s a cliche, but it’s very true. important that we remember that our sense of smell is connected to our limbic system in our brains, which processes emotion and memory. So when we use smell anywhere, when we smell actively it often triggers these very deep memories.
And we can also remember very well. So when we’re introduced a topic with a smell, we’re more likely to remember that topic because we’ve engaged with more of our senses, especially our sense of smell, which links directly to emotion and memory.
So when I give lectures, I usually start with a smell. So I present the audience or a group with a smell and a topic. And then I teach them about something through this smell. And a lot of the time people remember it later. So I’ve also tested this where I’ll ask, well, what did you like the most about my talk?
And they’ll say, well, you told me about that topic and introduced that smell. And they’ll actually say exactly like what I taught them and the smells that I introduced with it. And so that’s what I really love about it is that people remember
what they’re introduced and so how that differs from vision is that, like you said, we could look at paintings all day long. But as we know, in museums, oftentimes, the time that people spend in front of paintings is very short. And if you use a sense, it doesn’t have to be smell, I’m here talking about smell, but It slows you down.
So oftentimes when you’re introduced to smell in front of a painting, whether that’s with a tour guide or there’s a station there that has a smell, it slows down the visitor and they have to look for where that smell comes from or they’re looking Yeah, why am I smelling this? Is it somewhere in this painting?
So it’s a really nice thing as Marie Clapeau said, who’s a museum educator. She was at the Met previously as a museum educator. She says, smell slows you down. So that’s something I always like to say as another thing I really like about, about using smell in the museum.
Claire Bown: Yeah, love that because we’re big fans of slow and slowing down on this podcast.
We talk about it a lot and we talk about how we can engage people in different ways in front of objects and artworks as well. And I’ve certainly had a kit with me when I used to facilitate tours in the past that included Smells as well. I used to carry around little cotton buds with essential oils on them.
There was one object in the Rijksmuseum, which I love to go to – a prayer nut -, which when you opened it up would have a smell in it in the past. And I did a bit of research to find out. What kind of smells would be in this prayer nut and recreated that in my own little kit, which in some ways helped to look at this tiny object, which we may have otherwise overlooked and children in particular, and adults, I should add, absolutely loved it.
It’s that different way of engaging.
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yeah. So I’ve been working with Odeuropa for three years, and we had the message always, museums are ocular centric places, we’re always using our sense of sight and a lot of museum professionals don’t know how to use smell, and we made all of these assumptions, which I’m learning now, are assumptions, because as you just said as you said yourself, you’ve used smell as a tool before in your tours. And so Otaropa ended in December of last year because our funding, ended, and now I’m exploring in my own way finding people out there that are experimenting with smell in the museum that I didn’t know about before.
So, and it’s always these really experimental ways.
methods like cotton balls or blotters, I usually use these scent strips then it becomes a little less of a risk for them. But I like these things that I’m learning along the way from people like you, that there are these experimental ways that scent is being used or has been used for years before.
And that’s something that is great about the Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit which we wrote within Odeuropa. There’s all these. Practical methods that you could use to bring smell into the museum that maybe you’ve been using other methods before, but these might be even more useful for museum settings, or maybe there’s something in there that you wouldn’t have thought of.
I’m sure there’s plenty of people listening to this podcast right now that have innovative ways that they might have used smell. So if you have done, then please get in touch with Sofia and share your experiences of using smell in a variety of ways. Then we can build a community around this. Yeah, I love
that.
Claire Bown: Yeah, and I’d love to move on to talk about Odeuropa. It sounds fascinating. Can you tell us a little bit about your work that you did on this European wide project?
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yeah, so, Odeuropa was funded by the European Union for three years and that was across Europe.
There were seven institutions and six different countries within Europe including the UK. And we worked towards the main argument, and I’ll quote here, that ‘critically engaging our sense of smell and our olfactory heritage is an important and viable means for connecting and promoting Europe’s cultural heritage.’
So that’s our. kind of tagline. If you could say that. And yeah the important thing is our sense of smell is undervalued. As we all may know already, we value our sense of of sight, our sense of hearing mostly. And these are also the senses that we use most, I think, in the museum setting as well.
And so this project was really trying, I think what this project did well is we broke that barrier a bit that, okay, we received funding from the European to study about smell or research about smell. So this is a really interesting thing. And a big breaking point, I think, for The four smell research in general, because usually it’s been undervalued.
So the fact that we got funding was really amazing. There were many facets of Odeuropa, so there was also an AI aspect, but I will leave that behind because we’re on a museum podcast, so I’ll focus on the impact side of the project, which focused on olfactory heritage and also using smell as a technique.
And storytelling in the museum. And I want to emphasize that using smell in the museum is not new, but what Odoropa did that was really interesting is we researched how smell has been used as a storytelling technique, in the past.
We uncovered some challenges along the way of storytelling with scent. And then we put it all in one place you can read all the information you need to know and understand how. You could use smell as a storytelling technique from finding olfactory narratives, all the way to designing an olfactory event. In addition to this, as we were organizing these olfactory events to test some of these methods, we also developed impact questionnaires. So we interviewed 800 different visitors to heritage institutions across Europe on how they felt the experience of using smell in the museum went for them.
Did it add value to the experience? Did it not? Did they like it? And overall, most people did. Enjoy engaging with smell. Also, many people said they would pay more money if the collections had more smells present. So this is another new aspect that Odeuropa added to the impact of olfactory storytelling in museums, that not only did we test methods from before and put them all in one place for people to find, but we also actually understood We had some assumptions, but we were actually able to pinpoint some of the things that visitors valued or didn’t value about using smell in the museum.
And so my colleague, Cecilia Bambibre she Interviewed many museum professionals in order to design these questionnaires. And so
this is also a very important piece of the puzzle of Odeuropa.
Claire Bown: And listeners can find that research on a website. We can provide a link to that as well. I’m sure people will be interested in reading more about that. So tell me more about these olfactory events that you were producing, creating.
Who did you work with?
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yeah. So we produced around four olfactory events in addition to a few small projects to test out these different methods of using smell in not only in the museum, but also we produced a couple of scent cards for the American Historical Review Journal. But one of the, I would say one of the Most important and valuable projects that we did was a olfactory guided tour, which we developed with Museum Ulm in Germany with the curator there.
And for this, Odeuropa acted as in between in a way of working with the curator to identify artworks in the permanent collection that would relate to Olfactory history and then Also, an in between the curator and a perfumer or a group of perfumers at International Flavors and Fragrances, so IFF, to develop the scents that would then interpret the collections into into smells.
We also provided the museum with help to design these Olfactory guided tours. So, we said, okay here are the scents. This is how you should distribute them to your visitors who attend the guided tours. And we provided them with three methods. I can explain those methods if you’d like.
They’re very practical.
Claire Bown: Yeah, no, I’m really interested in the nuts and bolts and how it works in practice. So this is a guided tour with a guide rather than self guided. So how did you, yeah, use the scent?
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yeah, so, so Eva Leichtensteiner is the curator there and she’s very used to giving guided tours through the museum collection.
So this is something they also have tour guides which they hire to give these tours through the collection. And so what we did is we picked nine artworks from their collection and these were also artworks that some of them didn’t get a lot of interest. Because they were a little bit neglected, I guess you could say.
And so we, this was a way for them to highlight those artworks. So one of those artworks is a portrait of Eitel Besserer and I think it’s from 1516 and it’s a portrait of a very well off member of society and he’s wearing a f.
beautiful fur hat and fur coat. But what you don’t notice, because it’s a very small painting, is that in his hand, he’s holding a rosary with a small silver jewel at the end of it. And that’s a pomander. And so what’s really interesting about this depiction of a pomander is that usually pomanders were associated with women.
And so, pomanders were these fragrant jewels that were filled with spices. And what you would do is, you would pull it up to your nose every time you smelled a bad smell. And this was because people thought that bad smells led to disease. That was during the miasma theory.
And so we provided IFF with a historic recipe of a pomander. And so then a scent was created that was based on this recipe. So what Eva could do is when she’s giving a tour, she could Bye. To present this scent, which we gave three methods.
One was blotter. So that’s the scent strips that you find at Sephora or at your local perfume shop that were dipped in the scent and then handed out to the people who are on the tour, a hand fan which was sprayed with scent so you could just wave it at your tour participants, and the last one is called a wispy and a wispy is a little bit more difficult to describe but it’s a small plastic tube you could say with a little sponge inside that you put oil, perfume oil in so it could also be essential oil, and you could push it up and down in front of your nose.
And it puts out dry air. So actually Eva really liked this because you can use it for a very long time. So yeah, so then Eva could go in front of the artwork, hand out the scent, and she could tell about Eitel Besser. and tell about the history of a pomander. And everyone who was listening could learn about not only the history of this object or the history of the man in the portrait, but also a piece of medical history. Because you may not have known that miasma theory existed and that we thought that disease came from bad smells.
So all of these little pieces are different types of knowledge, not only about the artwork that was in front of you, which you might have missed the palmander because it’s very small. So it gave a new connection to this artwork that’s hanging on the wall.
And so we did this with, Different art, all the different artworks, and each of the tour guides were able to choose their favorites and design their own tour based on their interests, not only in design so you could choose your different method of design. distributing the scent, but you could also choose the artworks that you liked the best or that you had the most connection to.
Claire Bown: So I love this idea of giving choice to the people facilitating the tours as well, so they can choose the manner in which the scent is distributed. I think that’s a great idea, but also choosing which artworks that they’re going to work with.
What did the participants think about bringing in the sense of smell into their guided tour? Was there any kind of Feedback done with participants afterwards?
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yeah, so overall it was very positive and many people especially loved this pomander scent and there was another scent we did with perfumed gloves and I think that these two were the favourites because they’re like this tangible object that you can really connect to the artwork but also to everyday life and it’s a thing that you might have missed if you just I think it’s really important that people viewed the artwork.
So that’s an important thing, right? That when you’re using olfactory storytelling, that it’s not just you see something and then you smell something, but also that it adds a new layer of understanding that you may have missed if you just looked at the artwork. So this is something that I think people really valued that they learned.
They learned something new about history, about the artwork that they didn’t know before. We also experienced that it opens people up. in terms of conversation. So in a guided tour, this was really great because people just were talking to each other and enjoying, like, they learned about each other.
you learn very personal things about people that you may Maybe you wanted to know, maybe you didn’t want to know, but that’s also interesting, right? Because we think many people, or I’ve talked to many people, that find museums to be unwelcoming places in a way for them.
In particular, they don’t find that museums can be accessible in certain ways, or they don’t feel smart enough to be in the museum, or whatever that may be. And so this new layer of adding smell really opens up a new avenue of understanding for them that’s accessible,
when you introduce it in the museum, all of a sudden, all of these things come up and they’re really engaging with the artwork and each other. And that’s something that’s quite nice when museum galleries are usually very quiet. So, so you all of a sudden get people talking.
Claire Bown: Yeah, I love that. Scent is just a conversation starter, isn’t it? As you say, it’s an accessible way of creating conversations between people, connecting people to each other through a sense of smell and who hasn’t had an experience where they’ve smelt a smell and it’s transported them back in time to a place, to a memory to something connected to a loved one. All of those are great personal connections that can add an extra dimension to a guided tour. So, Tell me a little bit about the Olfactory Storytelling Kit because I think this will be so interesting for listeners to think about having a toolkit that they could use to really think about how they could incorporate more smell into their work as museum educators.
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yeah, so writing the Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit was quite a challenge because to be honest,
we are academic researchers and we are not museum professionals. So throughout the process we invited some museum professionals to write in the toolkit. So there are a few inspirational case studies, in the toolkit that show how a museum educator, for example, has used smell in the museum.
But it’s a really practical hands on guide that you can just pick up, you can open a section and learn how to design an Olfactory guided tour, for example. So as I mentioned, those guided tours in we learned so much from that, that we put it into the toolkit in a way that you could pick up a worksheet and you could actually read step by step how to conduct your own Olfactory guided tour.
for example. Download the Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit and take a look at it because there’s, it’s very practical and hands on. And I think I mentioned before that this information has never been put into one place. So there’s all these places where people are using smell in the museum, but it’s not in one place for for you to find.
There’s a couple of things that jumped out at me.
Claire Bown: A smell walk. You talk also about a sniffer in residence. Can you explain some of these terms to us?
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yes. So, so smell walks, we had a PhD researching specifically, Smell Walks named Victoria and Michelle, so she wrote the section about smell walks. A smell walk is really great, actually, especially in the museum, because you don’t need to add any smells to the existing environment.
So it’s really about how you can walk through a museum or a park or a city or wherever and you can explore using your nose.
So that’s a smell walk. It’s actually really nice to do outside. So maybe if like a botanical garden or if a museum has a garden or some sort of outdoor space or open air space, it’s a really nice idea.
And then a sniffer in residence. This would be great if it became typical in a museum, but it would probably be a while from now, but it’s basically someone that you allow into your museum depot to ‘sniff out’ your objects. So there’s a lot of We found that there’s a lot of objects in museums that are in depots that actually have an inherent scent.
So this could be like a pomander, or it could be leather gloves, or it could be a snuff box that is sitting in the depot that actually still has a smell on it. So you could invite a sniffer in residence to smell that object, and then perhaps you could work with a perfumer to create The scent of that object whether that’s to safeguard it for future generations or to use it as an educational tool in your museum.
It’s, that’s up to you. But that’s what a sniffer in residence is. So I would love it if. Museums would invite the, would invite this idea, it would be really great.
Claire Bown: I think it’s fantastic. Really creative ways of thinking about your collection as well, especially with things which might be neglected, as you’ve mentioned before, things that are lying in the depot that haven’t seen the light of day for a while.
How can we creatively work with parts of the collection that we may be ignoring or we haven’t worked with for a while? You were reminding me then of your work that you did with the Amsterdam Museum, and that’s all about a scratch and sniff map. So can you tell us a little bit about that? This is ingenious.
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yeah, everybody loves this event because it involves our nostalgic senses as well, because we all, I think, remember scratch and sniff from our childhood. So it’s a very popular one. But so one of the events for the Odeuropa project was to create a self guided city tour through Amsterdam that also used an app.
So, this was very challenging because it’s difficult to set up scents in the city without loads of permissions. So how we avoided that is we printed a scratch and sniff map and the Amsterdam Museum hosted this event. And what I thought was interesting to mention here is, yes, the event is really cool in terms of it had a scratch and sniff map and everybody could explore the city through their nose.
But for me, this was also an interesting experience in terms of learning the importance of training and communication when using smell in the museum, because I had, I worked with the Amsterdam museum and it was important that they received a brief training from me to talk about what the scents were on the card, how to communicate the event to people who wanted to do it.
How the Scent technology worked in terms of Scratch and Sniff so because people would come to them with questions about how does Scratch and Sniff work? Or how do I use this map? Or why is there an app with it? Because it was also with an application and how do they interrelate? So,
Scratch and Sniff sounds super awesome and everybody wants to do it. But that there’s also these moments before where you communicate with everyone in your team. And also communicate internally and externally about the project. The Olfactory Event, how it’s going to work and why it’s important to use smell as a storytelling technique.
So we’ll link to that project, but I’d love to know what you’ve been working on recently. Where is your work taking you? How are you helping museums to incorporate more smells into their collection? Yeah.
Claire Bown: What are you working on right now?
Sofia Collette Ehrich: So one of the things that I did recently, or I was asked to do recently, was to go to a museum center in Turku, Finland, and this was a great honor. They have funding through the Erasmus Plus program to invite an expert to, they called it job shadow them. So basically what I did was for three full days, I went to their museums.
They call it the Turku Museum Center. It’s a group of about six museums from all different timeframes, which is really interesting. So you have like a castle, there’s Turku Castle, but then there’s also the Contemporary Art Museum. There’s a historic house. There’s an open air museum. So there’s all these different types of museums which function very differently.
So that was a big, learning point for me, because within this group, there was such varied content and individuals who work there. And I went there and I gave a lecture to about 26 museum educators and curators, and some were directors as well. And then they took me around their museum and they told me about what they’re already doing with the senses.
In their collections, but also where they want to go in the future. And so I just helped them shape conversations around multi sensory storytelling in the museum. And really what I found the most fascinating and interesting is they were already using multi sensory storytelling, particularly smell, or olfactory storytelling, so beautifully.
But there were certain small things. For example, they had this amazing smell station with which they just had like jam jars.
So they had cleaned out jam jars, stuck them to the bottom of like a really nicely made wooden structure. And then every couple of weeks they fill it with essential oils so that you can lift a flap and then smell or have a sniff. But they hadn’t cleaned these jars in a while. So these little things like, I said to them, you should really clean the jars or replace the jars soon.
Yeah, I would like to have more opportunities like this because I think I learned a lot, but also they had a space to really discuss multisensory storytelling because I was there to guide the conversations,
And so it was, yeah, it was a really great experience. And then I’m writing papers sometimes to share this information.
And I’m alsostarting to write a substack, which is, specifically about using smell in the museum and other multisensory aspects. And I want to give very practical advice through this channel, but to also build a network. So as you mentioned earlier, please do let me know if you’re using smell in your museum in innovative ways, because I would love to build a community around this so that we could share this information and make it.
So that more people have that information, but alsothat it’s it’s information that is wanted by museum community.
Claire Bown: Absolutely. You mentioned practical tips that you were sharing with the people in Turku. Maybe you could leave us with a few practical tips for listeners about how they might be able to incorporate more olfactory elements into their programs or their practice.
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yeah, so one of the best ways to to use smell in the museum is actually you don’t have to use smell. You can just ‘raise an olfactory gaze’, as Caro Verbeek has coined the word olfactory gaze. So that’s just when you look at paintings or look at your collection through the perspective of smell.
So there are many artworks. that you may not notice on the walls of your museum that have smell as a topic within them. So for example, I always use because many museums have a depiction of the Adoration of the Magi on their wall, which is the story of when Christ is presented gifts by the three kings.
And two of these gifts are scents. So, frankincense and myrrh and gold. And so, that’s also an easy way to just get people to slow down in your collections. You can say, oh, well, you can raise an olfactory gaze, look for all the smells that are around the walls of the gallery. So that could be one practical way and it doesn’t require any money and it doesn’t require, it requires limited knowledge.
There’s also ways you don’t have to have a perfumer make a scent for you. You can use, this is something that the Turku Museum did very well. They used spices, they used essential oils they could purchase online. So you can also do this with guided tours where you just use essential oils to present in front of the artworks.
And then I think it’s also important to just Start conversations with your friends and family, with your co workers about the senses.
This is always a good tip because you won’t start using your senses in the museum until you start being aware of your senses yourself. That if you smell something outside, or notice it, just acknowledge that, oh that’s a smell, or start, take a perfume class, or the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles does a lot of online programming, it’s really interesting, could dive into a topic there, or buy a perfume kit, or just something to start with.
To start getting into that mindset of using your senses as a diagnostic tool to understand the world rather than just implicit that, oh, my food smells good. It’s there. So I think that’s always a good first step.
Claire Bown: Yeah, I love that. Developing that awareness as well, so that we are more aware of smell.
Like you mentioned the jelly bean test right at the very beginning. Thinking about what senses am I using here as well? I’m relying on my sense of sight. I’m relying on my hearing. Are there other senses I can bring in as well? So yeah, developing that awareness and really great practical tips there for listeners.
Yeah, so perhaps you could finish by just telling Listen to us, how they can get in touch with you, where they can find you on social media and how they can work with you.
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yeah. So I have a website which will be linked in the show notes. I’m also very active on LinkedIn, so you can find me there.
I have a very unique name, so I’m pretty easy to find. And yeah, as I said, I’m also I’ll be posting on Substack.
I also have a instagram which is under the name, the Sensational Explorer. Great name. So, yeah.
Claire Bown: And you have a podcast as well. Podcast. So tell us a little bit about your podcast.
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yeah, I am the host for the sense of smell. It’s the Internet of Senses Institute podcast. So there’s an expert for every single sense. Five classic senses, and II’m the interviewer of the sense of smell.
And so on the podcast we invite thought leaders and others who are. working specifically in the field of smell. And so I’ve had someone who’s working with olfactory virtual reality on there. I’ve had aromatherapists, people working with scent communication. I’ve had a museum educator, Marie Clapot on there, which is a really interesting one, I think, for this audience. And also one of my favorite interviews is with Andreas Keller, who has his own olfactory art gallery in New York, the only commercial olfactory art gallery in the world. So that’s also a really interesting one, maybe for the listeners here.
Claire Bown: Lovely. We will link to all of those as well. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, Sofia. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.
Sofia Collette Ehrich: Yeah, thank you. It’s been a really nice conversation.
Claire Bown: So a massive thank you to Sofia for joining me on the podcast today. Go to the show notes to find out more about Sofia’s work, get in touch with her, and to download the Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit.
That just about wraps up this episode. Thank you for tuning in. I’ll see you next time. Bye. Thank you for listening to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown. You can find more art engagement resources by visiting my website, thinkingmuseum. com and you can also find me on Instagram at thinkingmuseum, where I regularly share tips and tools on how to bring art to life and engage your audience.
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please share with others and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice. Thank you so much for listening and I’ll see you next time.
Episode Links:
https://thesensesationalexplorer.substack.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sofia-collette-ehrich
https://www.instagram.com/thesensesationalexplorer
Museum Ulm Links:
https://odeuropa.eu/2022/04/now-open-follow-your-nose-at-museum-ulm
https://odeuropa.eu/2023/01/update-follow-your-nose
City Sniffers Links:
https://odeuropa.eu/2022/08/launch-of-city-sniffers-a-smell-tour-of-amsterdams-ecohistory
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7utP_pAx_E
Odeuropa Impact:
This is an interesting report about the interviews Cecilia Bembibre conducted with museum professionals who have used smells in GLAMs: https://odeuropa.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/D6_1_Guidelines_on_the_Use_of_Smells_in_GLAMs.pdf
Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit:
Download it here: https://zenodo.org/records/10254737
Guidelines for conducting an olfactory guided tour here: https://zenodo.org/records/10102080
Guidelines for conducting a smell walk here: https://zenodo.org/records/10101016
A talk Sofia gave for the Swedish Heritage Commission which included many practical examples:
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